Sagan Program

The Sagan Fellowship Program supports outstanding recent postdoctoral
scientists to conduct independent research that is broadly related to
the science goals of the NASA Exoplanet Exploration area. The primary
goal of missions within this program is to discover and characterize
planetary systems and Earth-like planets around nearby stars.
Fellowship recipients receive financial support to conduct research at
a host institution in the US for a period of up to three years (subject
to annual review and availability of funds from NASA). Find the application and other information
here and meet current and past Sagan Fellows here.

The Sagan Exoplanet Summer Workshops are held annually and provide opportunities for students, postdocs, and researchers to learn about the engineering and scientific
application of exoplanet-related techniques used in the Exoplanet
Exploration Program.

News Items

September 2011: Former Michelson Fellow Remi Soummer leads a team, including current Sagan Fellow Laurent Pueyo, that has re-examined Hubble Space Telescope data from 1998 to find visual evidence for two of the planets orbiting HR8799. HR8799 hosts four exoplanets, three of which are the only exoplanets to be identified by direct imaging. The exoplanets were first identified in data collected in 2007-2008 by the Keck and Gemini telescopes. Finding visual evidence for two of these planets in the 1998 Hubble data gives astronomers a time machine for comparing much earlier orbital motion data to more recent observations. Click here to read the full press release.

December 2010: Sagan Fellows Joshua Bean and Eliza Kempton are two of the authors on a 2 December 2010 Nature paper that describes the first characterization of a super-Earth's atmosphere using ground based telescopes. Read the full press release here.

November 9th marks Carl Sagan's birthday, a day that was celebrated in many locales for the first time in 2009 as Sagan Day. We've asked our 2009 and 2010 Carl Sagan Postdoctoral Fellows to reflect on how their research would appeal to Carl Sagan. Click here to read their responses.

Hear an interview
produced by the Planetary Society with Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan's collaborator
and widow,
and Bill Nye (the Science Guy) on the honor of naming the Exoplanet
Fellowship program after Carl Sagan.